Phase Space (3 page)

Nevertheless he isn’t bugging Jays, and he seems to know all about China. Jays lets him open up about his eunuch reference.

Once, says Percy, the Chinese led the world in technology: they had printing, gunpowder, the compass, in some cases centuries before Europe. At the time of the early Ming Dynasty, in the early fifteenth century, they even went exploring.

They built fifteen-hundred-ton ‘treasure ships’, each big enough to carry five hundred men. Chinese explorers rounded southern Asia to Bengal, Ceylon and even reached the east coast of Africa in 1420, prefiguring the Portuguese expeditions by fifty years. The ships brought home exotic novelties – people, animals, plants – and struck terror wherever they landed.

‘The great voyages were led by Admiral Zheng-Ho,’ says Percy, ‘who was a eunuch. But in 1436 a new emperor came to the throne, called Zheng Dung. He cut the building of ships, the construction of armaments and so forth. The Navy fell apart, and China was isolated from the rest of the world, until the barbarians from Europe came sailing up four centuries later. There are obvious resonances for our times –’

‘Yeah,’ growls Jays.

‘The cause of it all was conflict between the Confucian scholars who ran the imperial bureaucracy, and the Grand Eunuchs of the Imperial Court. The eunuchs’ voyages were seen as a threat to the bureaucracy. But the Confucians were in charge of educating the emperor and they had played a long game. They had convinced the young Zheng Dung that China was self-sufficient, and didn’t need to deal with the barbarian lands at its rim. So they blocked technological development, to maintain their feudal power …’

Some of the other fans, sensing the implicit approval Jays is bestowing on Percy, are edging closer. They start to speculate, as Jays has learned fans will do, about what-if parallel universes in which the Chinese kept going. Perhaps Francis Drake would have faced an Armada of Chinese treasure-ships. Perhaps Zheng-Ho might have reached America before Columbus. And so on.

Jays asks Percy what happened to Zheng-Ho. He shrugs, almost spilling the beer he has barely sipped. ‘There are stories that he went off to the hinterland and tried to keep exploring, with technologies out of the grasp of the bureaucrats. China is a big country, after all; there was room for such things. And room for a lot of legends. Zheng had followers, who are supposed to have kept up the work after his death, until the Confucians closed them down. It’s probably all apocryphal. Man-carrying rockets, for instance.’

There is general laughter at this, and there is more speculative chatter about a Chinese space programme of the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries.

Jays is reminded of what he once knew of the history of rocketry. The Chinese developed the first rockets around the year 1000
A.D.,
under the Sung Dynasty: the versions that leaked to Europe via the usual trade routes were just crude affairs, gunpowder-filled bamboo or pasteboard tubes with little power and unpredictable trajectories … Still, reflects Jays, in the heart of China, there might have been five centuries of development of this technology by Zheng-Ho’s day.

There is also, it seems, a Chinese legend local to Hereford: of a sixteenth-century traveller from Spain who came here with what sounds like a goods caravan, laden with exotic jewellery and herbs, all, he claimed, from the heart of mysterious Cathay.

Oddly, he also brings rocks.

The tale is recorded in the Godwin Chapel’s stained-glass window. And some of the locals remember the incident by keeping up an old tradition of a festival held on the fifteenth of August, celebrating the day a Chinese goddess was supposed to drink a magic elixir and fly to the Moon. There are invitations for Jays to come back on the fifteenth of August, a couple of months away.

Alice has finished her white-wine spritzer, and is discreetly plucking at his sleeve.

They make their farewells and apologies, and escape into the cooling air of the evening.

In the pub garden, a wood-fire barbecue is burning, wood to make this cultural import seem more traditionally English, he guesses. The smell of the wood takes him right back, across twenty-five years …

…
after the first Moonwalk, when the oxygen had rushed back into the aluminium balloon that was the LM’s cabin, and both of them were covered in grime, when Charlie took off his helmet, and Jays took a picture of his smiling, lined, bearded face, and then of the area outside, the flag and equipment and the parked Rover and footprints everywhere, footprints that might last a million years, and when he took his own helmet off, there was a pungent smell, the odour of wood-smoke, or maybe of gunpowder: it is the smell of Moondust, slow-burning in oxygen from Earth …

But it is time for dinner with the publisher’s rep, and they walk on.

In bed, Jays glances through the Godwin book. It is a comedy – he guesses – lacking the gloss of modern science fiction. But some of the ideas seem reasonably sophisticated, for its time. The good Bishop was a little mixed up about the size of the stars, but his universe was Copernican – with the planets circling the sun – and he got gravity more or less right, with references to different gravity on the Earth and Moon, weightlessness between worlds, and the problems of re-entry to Earth’s atmosphere.

Jays has read, or rather discarded, some modern hard sf which contains worse bloopers.

He describes all this to Alice. ‘It’s hardly a traveller’s guide,’ he says, ‘but –’

She takes the book from him and kisses him on the cheek. ‘You’re very sweet, but very transparent. You’d love it to be true, wouldn’t you?’

‘What?’

‘I could see what you were thinking, in that ridiculous pub. Maybe the Chinese went to the Moon, in the fifteenth century. Maybe the story somehow reached England – here, Hereford – perhaps through the traveller they talked about.’

‘And maybe Bishop Godwin wrote it up.’

She leafs through the book. ‘But why not just tell the story straight? Why all this stuff about swans? Why not just write about the Chinese admiral and his rockets?’

He shrugs. ‘Because he couldn’t be straight. Just as I write science fiction, rather than documentary.’ It is true. His autobiography was actually ghosted. They have had discussions like this before, prompted by reviews and analysis of his work.

‘The analogy doesn’t hold,’ she says. ‘You did something extraordinary, something no human had done before. And you weren’t trained to describe it. Not even to observe. No wonder you write your books. It’s your way of working it out in your own head.’

He shrugs. ‘It was that, or find Jesus like the other guys. Anyway, my point is nobody would have believed Godwin. Think of the context of the times. Nobody believed Copernicus, for God’s sake. Maybe Godwin didn’t believe it himself.’

‘
I
don’t believe it. Listen to this. Gonsales finds an inhabited Moon, and the creatures live in a Utopia and are superior to us. Of course. And they weed out any who fall short of the mark, and throw them off to Earth … “The ordinary vent for them is a certain high hill in the North of America, whose people I can easily believe to be wholly descended from them …”’

He laughs. ‘Damn these Brits. Ungrateful even then. What happens to Gonsales in the end?’

Alice flicks through the book. ‘The Moon prince gives him jewels, he sets off for Earth with his swans … and lands in China, where they lock him up as a magician.’ She throws the book down. ‘China. And I hope you’re not going to read anything into
that.
I’m going to throw this damn book away. You’re obsessed, Jays. You look for Moon stories that don’t exist. I don’t blame you. But it’s the truth. You’re a Moon-calf …’

She turns her light out.

It is many hours before he can sleep.

He has to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night. It is an old-man’s thing. He tries to float out of bed, and falls to the floor, heavy on the carpet. This has happened before.

The next day is their last in England, and they have to take a train into London, then the Tube back out to Heathrow.

Jays gets up early. Without waking Alice, he slips on his track suit and sneakers, and runs out into empty streets. Squat electric carts are delivering milk, whirring along the streets, making a noise that reminds him of the prototype Lunar Rovers he saw under test at Boeing.

He jogs until the air, already hot, is whistling in his throat.

He reaches the cathedral. It is locked up, and he is disappointed, but he discovers he can work his way around the outside. He quickly finds the Godwin Chapel. It is hard to miss, a dark, grimy encrustation on the cool sandstone of the cathedral.

He runs his hand over the exterior of the rock. It is heavily weathered, of course, and encrusted with lichen. But its vesicular nature is easy to confirm, in the bright morning light.

He knows that lunar basalts, formed when the great primordial impact basins were flooded with lava, have a lot in common with terrestrial lavas – they are mostly feldspar, pyroxene, olivine and ilmenite – but there are key differences too. Lunar rocks possess native iron, for instance. They have been subjected to shock damage from micrometeorite impact, and to radiation damage from solar wind and cosmic rays. They have some trace elements, such as hydrogen, carbon and nitrogen, implanted there by the solar wind. They contain no water at all …

He wishes he could take a sample. But he has no tools. And who would run the assay for him? He works his way around the chapel, running his hands over the surface.

He finds that a chunk of the chapel wall, a fist-sized pebble, has broken away from one corner. The pebble is just lying in the grass.

He cannot tell if this is frost damage, or perhaps vegetative, or some minor piece of vandalism.

Guiltily, he slips the pebble into his pocket.

On the train to London, with the two of them facing each other surrounded by luggage, he toys with the pebble.

‘Scottish basalt,’ Alice says.

‘Sure.’

‘You should be ashamed.’ She is laughing, but he senses she means it. ‘If every American tourist came away with trophies there’d be none of England left …’

He knows she is right. He does not want to keep this piece.

She calls him a Moon-calf again.

He waits until she has gone to the buffet for a fresh coffee. He glances around; nobody can see him.

He has a full can of diet soda. He rests his rock, on a newspaper, on the tiny British Rail table that is fixed to the wall before him. He smashes the rock with the base of the can; the rock cracks open.

As the interior is exposed to the air for the first time, there is a smell like wood-smoke.

He breathes it in for a few seconds. Then he brushes the fragments of rock into the palm of his hand, and dumps it out the window. The rock is scattered along the track, and lost; he brushes the last grains from his hands.

When Alice returns, London is approaching, modern suburbs crowding out the ancient English landscape. They start to talk about the flight home, checking tickets and terminals and passports.

It began, in fact, with a supernova: thus, from the beginning, it was a causal chain shaped by stupendous violence.

The star was a blue supergiant, twenty times the mass of Earth’s sun, fifty thousand times as bright. It had formed a mere million years ago.

Nevertheless there was life here.

It had come drifting on the interstellar winds from older, more stable systems, and taken root on worlds which cautiously skirted the central fire.

But the hydrogen fuel in the star’s fusing core was already exhausted.

The core, clogged with helium ash, began to burn that ash itself, helium nuclei fusing to carbon. And the carbon compacted to neon, the neon to oxygen … At last iron nuclei snowed, inert, on the centre of the star.

The core’s free-fall implosion took fractions of a second. The star’s outer layers were suddenly suspended over an effective vacuum. They collapsed inwards, the infalling layers crashing onto the rigid core remnant, and rebounded violently. The reflected shock wave was hurled out of the centre of the star, dragging away the star’s outer layers with it …

For a week, the dying star outshone its Galaxy.

For forty years the expanding shell of matter travelled, preceded by a sleet of electromagnetic radiation: gamma rays, X rays, visible light. A human eye might have seen a brilliant blue-white star grow suddenly tremendously luminous, fifty times as bright as the Moon, as bright as all the other stars in the sky combined.